Mediac

by Benjamin Ray Allee

A malevolent Brutalist architect’s most mysterious work finds a new fan. An ad-man desperate for approval succumbs to alluring, yet horrific, commercial rhetoric. A director stages a school shooting, repeating the tragedy again and again in search of a solution. And in 1960s Upstate New York, an artistic residency meets a dismal fate—its reverberations, somehow, reach every corner of these tales. In each of these stories, creators and communicators attempt to create art, or at least to understand it. Their efforts and failures reveal the strange that our ideas, and the ways we convey them, can make victims and villains of us all.

331 pages, Paperback

Published June 29, 2025

Reviews

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t always find a short story collection full of all bangers. Usually it’s a 70/80 % chance of great ones. This is the exception. Every single one had me stopping afterwards and say to myself, is this a writer who has a dozen books under his belt? I couldn’t believe the strength of each of these stories. Art comes in many forms and this collection brings out a love of almost everything be it photography or writing or ceramics. It’s always fun when a bookstagrammer I follow writes their own book. I buy it. Read it. Usually love it cause we have similar tastes but this was different. Ben is seriously talented and I will be following his career go forward. 10 page short stories or 700 page novel. I’m here for whatever you write.

Also, shoutout to Anxiety Press. I keep buying their stuff and it’s always awesome. Damnnnnn.

Here’s a link if you want. Sorry, here’s a link for you to definitely purchase…

https://bookshop.org/p/books/mediac/6...

[Mathewson Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much as collections of stories as a smorgasbord sampling of various artistic pursuits through an eerie gothic lens. In the world of Mediac: art is obsession and creation is compulsion. These characters are just as imprisoned by art as they are liberated. Is Good!

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

With an ear for the rhythmic poetry of aesthetic jargon, and a Hitchcockian sense of the macabre lurking just out of frame, Ben Allee invokes unsettling questions about the nature and future of creative work that singe and linger like a lighter held to the brainstem, their implications only darkening as the world modernizes around them. Through its entwined tales of obsessive painting and impossible photography, infinite theatre and possessed dance, ephemeral sculpture and eternal architecture, Mediac digs a potter's field for all our fast-dying arts, and stands formidably over top as a brutalist monument to writing itself - perhaps the fastest dying of them all.